Ya Had To Be There

It's my impression that you can't call someone your friend until you have an "inside joke" with them. You know, those random sayings that make you double over with laughter while everyone else wonders whether you're safe to touch because you might have mad cow disease?

These jokes are the glue that hold a great friendship together. Random experiences that get brought up repeatedly when there's nothing else to talk about, and can entertain you for hours on end.

My group of high school friends and I are some of the tightest knit people I know, and well...let's just say that if we decided to reminisce on all of our inside jokes in public, there'd be some nice men with fancy jackets waiting for us.

Right, Mr. Gilbride, I'm sure you really are Sneezy the Dwarf. Now just bend over and I'll give you some medicine that will make allllllll your sneezes go away. You can trust me...I'm a doctor.

For instance, I can pretty much reduce my friend Renae to tears of mirth by saying "nerka nerka." Get it? No? Yeah, that's my point here.

My friend Brandon and I don't say "month" anymore. We say "nibth." It's not because we have brain lesions, it's just hysterical to us.

I literally don't call my one friend by her first name anymore. It's Quiermo, always.

And don't even get me started on Spetznaz hiccups. Hoo-boy those were some good times.

So, in order to make this post more than me rambling on about jokes that make no sense to you, I propose a discussion. Do you agree that good friends need to have some sort of in-joke? Do you have friends like this? And if you're feeling really adventurous, let me know what some of these jokes are! I won't judge you much.

We're Still Kids Inside

There should be rules in life. Not many, just a specific few that no power could ever break to ensure unnecessary suffering. One of these should be that no child should lose a parent before they're a certain age.

Don't get me wrong, there's no time in any person's life where they wake up in the morning thinking "gee, I think I could do without my father from this day forth!" But there comes a time when you're mature enough, old enough, independent enough to bear the weight that everyone is going to have to bear at some point: losing their mother or father.

One of my closest friends lost her mother a few days ago. And when I say lost, I mean her mother was taken before her time. There was no illness that preceded this, no long drawn out process that made people brace themselves for the end, no signs that this was on the horizon. My friend simply awoke one morning with university security in her room and her dad on the phone. It isn't right.

Now I mean for this blog to be a happy one. Myself, I'm rarely ever not smiling. I think my friends could count the number of times I wasn't happy one of their hands. That's the kind of blog I expect this to be, but this post needs to be written, because I've been thinking about it all day.

I'm 18 years old, as is my friend. I'm still a child inside my heart. I still love animated movies, I still go sledding when it snows, and when I get sick, I still want my mom there to take care of me. It's part of who I am, and I'm too young to give that up. If I got sick, and I didn't even have the option to give my mom a call, just to hear a few comforting words, I don't know what I'd do.

We're in college. This is supposed to be the best time of our lives. My friend is strong, I know that she'll get through this, but still...this shouldn't happen to someone when they're 18 years old. It shouldn't happen to anyone, ever, but it definitely shouldn't happen to someone who's just flown the nest (or is still in the nest. There are so many that lost a parent long before they're 18)

My heart goes out to her. I hope she'll be alright. She's bound for good things and will make her mother proud.